On 5 January 1991, at the age of 73, Alfie Hinds finally found something he couldn’t escape: the Grim Reaper. In the 1950s and 60s, you see, he had (very much) earned the title given him in the Daily Telegraph’s obituary:
the most successful prison escaper in English history.
He was reputed to have performed his first institutional escape from a children’s home when he was 7, escaped from a borstal as a teenager, and deserted from the Royal Tank Corps in his 20s during WWII.
In September 1953, though, disaster struck. He was charged with the theft of £30,000 in jewellery and £4,700 in cash from a shop in the Tottenham Court Road, and jailed for 12 years. He had eight previous convictions, but always protested his innocence of this one.
He had, apparently, been going straight, working for his brother’s construction company, but while the evidence against him was circumstantial, the judge did spot holes in his testimony.
While inside, he published a pamphlet demanding an inquiry or retrial, and in 1955 escaped from Nottingham prison with the help of a hacksaw blade from an electrician’s bag and a copy of a key to the prison workshop — which he’d made from memory.
He was found in 1956, 245 days after his escape, in Dublin. He’d become something of an expert in the law by this time, and conducted his own defence, somehow managing to get himself acquitted of prison-breaking, and only having 11 days added to his sentence.
Back inside, he brought a case against the prison commissioners for illegal arrest, purely to get himself into a court building. He had plans, which involved friends fixing screw eyes to the door of a toilet cubicle…
He melted into the crowd outside, but on this occasion was arrested at an airport just five hours later. This time, he went to Chelmsford Prison.
He escaped from there in 1958 by making another key that got him into the bathhouse, from where he climbed onto the roof, and from there hopped over the wall. He decamped to Ireland for a further two years, but was stopped one day in 1960 by customs men looking for smuggled cars.
Back in England (in prison), he sold his story to The News of the World for £40,000, and found a way to get out for good. He sued for libel the original investigating officer Superintendent Herbert Sparks — who he suspected of fitting him up.
Sparks had retired and written his memoirs, in which he named Alfie as one of the perpetrators of the 1953 Maple’s job. In court, though, Sparks couldn’t prove it was true, so the great escaper got £1,300 in damages, a review of his sentence, and release.
So famous was he by this stage that his freedom was commemorated in a Giles cartoon in the Sunday Express.
Not everything went Alfie’s way, though. Against the advice of his barrister, he appealed against his conviction, and lost. As the Law Gazette put it:
Still, he was out, so he wrote a memoir (Contempt of Court), retired to Jersey, became secretary of the Channel Islands Mensa Society, and took to “lecturing at polytechnics and at the National Council for Civil liberties” about the “crying need … for a more intelligent police force”.
(That quote and the bits of text above are from The Very Best of The Daily Telegraph Books of Obituaries, by Hugh Massingberd, which I can very much recommend.)
